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Attention, like time or "life", is also completely perishable. If you're not monetizing it, let's say, or using it to entertain yourself — or, higher level, discipline your mind, meditate etc — you're losing it.
Rational-econ speaking, you should then be willing to sell attention-time for very little value (micropayments?!) when its second-best option isn't too important
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That's true. Attention can't be stored, and you can't really take a lot of time to decide what to do with it either. (Every amount of effort spent trying to optimize attention also spends attention).
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I'd like to explore the idea of paying for attention more.
Attention is scarce, and it's not free (it has opportunity cost). Everyone is endowed with a fixed amount of it... as far as we know it cannot really be increased on a per-person basis. Each individual is therefore the supplier of a perfectly inelastic supply of attention.
So the supply side is somewhat understood. But what is the demand side? Why do people seek attention? The most obvious reason is that the attention can be channeled into getting the person to buy something.
So: company spends money to garner attention, people give the company their attention, the attention is used to sell something, people pay the company to buy stuff, presumably more money than was spent to acquire their attention
But for the people who are giving their attention... at what point do they have so little of economic value to offer that the acquisition of their attention is no longer worthwhile? I suppose in the end there are still a lot of menial tasks that make the lives of our overlords easier, like standing in line for our masters or delivering food and groceries to them. As long as those tasks exist, there should be a reason for buying those peoples' attention.